Today’s interview is with Vida Gabriel, Founder, TerraFixing.

What Is TerraFixing?

What is TerraFixing and what inspired its creation?

Vida Gabriel - TerraFixing is a direct air capture company based in Ottawa, Canada, dedicated to cleaning the atmosphere of humanity’s legacy CO₂ emissions. Our technology leverages zeolites—an inert mineral made from silica and alumina—to efficiently capture CO₂ from the air. Unlike most DAC systems, which are designed for warm climates, ours thrives in cold, desolate, windswept locations, minimizing land and resource use while maximizing efficiency.

The inspiration for TerraFixing is an unexpected one. My co-founder, Dr. Sean Wilson, originally developed our patented process as a mosquito trap. His prototype captured water and CO₂ from the air and then released it at specific times to divert mosquitoes away from his nieces and nephews at their family cottage. It worked so well that he quickly realized its broader potential—what if this same technology could be used to remove CO₂ at scale? That realization led to the birth of TerraFixing, proving that innovation can come from the most unlikely places.

Strategy Inspiration

Your DAC technology is designed to thrive in freezing, dry climates — what inspired this bold strategy?

Vida Gabriel - Again, this points back to my co-founder Sean and his creativity. There are three main things that contributed to his innovation.

First, gases are easier to separate from each other when you decrease the temperature—this is a basic thermodynamics. IF you rearrange the second law of thermodynamics to plot the energy (known as “work”) required to separate gases as a function of temperature, you’ll see that with decreasing temperatures, the work required to separate gases decreases linearly. TL:DR, a mixture of cold gases is easier to separate than a mixture of hot gases according to Einstein’s favourite equation.

Second, there is naturally less moisture in cold air and this is a big deal. When you think about DAC, you’re ultimately trying to separate CO2 from all the other components in the air—oxygen, nitrogen, a bit of argon, and water. Water removal (or, air dehumidification) can be one of the most costly steps in a DAC process. So, we just go to a place where the air is naturally frier, we can avoid costly wter removal. As a side note, incumbent techs cant take advantage of this climate advantage because their sorbents literally freeze below zero degrees. Ours doesn’t involve any amines, hydroxyls or other components that can freeze

And third, our carbon capture material—zeolites—perform exceptionally well in cold conditions. At -20°C, they can capture over 3.5 times more CO2 than they can at 20°C. That’s a massive efficiency boost, meaning we can make our devices significantly much smaller while capturing more CO2. A double whammy if you ask me.

Artic Wind Power

Can you walk us through how wind power from Arctic regions is used to power your DAC systems, and the benefits that are shared with local communities?

Vida Gabriel - Yeah, so one of the biggest advantages of placing our DAC systems in cold, remote areas is that those places also have some of the highest wind energy potential in the world. We’re working with TUGLIQ Energie, a company that has over a decade of expertise in Arctic deployments of wind power, and we’re co-locating our DAC units with their turbines and the Northern mines and mining communities they’re decarbonizing.

There are a few ways this benefits both us and the communities. First, we’ve designed our DAC tech with intermittent power in mind and can turn the units on or off depending on power availability. So, that helps stabilize the grid and actually makes new wind projects more viable.

Second, a lot of remote communities still rely on diesel for power, which is expensive, bad for the environment and terrible for people’s health. By developing DAC in cold remote regions, we’re helping create a stronger business case for renewables in these regions, which means cleaner, cheaper energy for the people who live there.

Finally, these are new projects that can repurpose talent from existing declining industries, can create a train new high skilled labour and create thousands of new jobs on site and in future manufacturing sites for our DAC units. We’re bringing manufacturing, installation, and maintenance roles to northern communities, prioritizing local hiring and training. So, this isn’t just about carbon removal—it’s also about energy independence and economic development in remote Far North regions that have vulnerable populations that suffer some of the most drastic effects of climate change.

Helping Canada Reach Net-Zero

What role do you see TerraFixing playing in Canada's push to achieve its national net-zero goals?

Vida Gabriel - Canada’s net-zero plan includes cutting emissions, but there’s no getting around the fact that we also need to remove CO2. Some industries—like aviation and heavy industry—just aren’t going to be able to hit zero emissions. That’s where DAC comes in.

TerraFixing is making sure that Canada has a domestic solution for large-scale carbon removal. A lot of DAC technologies are designed for warm, humid climates, which means they’re not viable in most of Canada. On top of that, anyone who tried to deploy technology or a project anywhere will tell you that community engagement -positive or negative- is instrumental in the fate of a project. To that end, not only is our tech built for Canada—but it’s optimally suited for areas that people don’t want to live in, so the risk of project delays due to NIMBYism decreases (from what we’ve seen to date at least!)

We’re also directly supporting renewable energy deployment. By being a major off-taker for wind power in the North, we’re creating financial incentives for more wind projects, which speeds up Canada’s energy transition.

Long-Term Vision

What’s the long-term vision for TerraFixing’s climate hubs, and how many do you hope to deploy by 2030?

Vida Gabriel - The vision is just how you described it in your question. We see gigatonne scale carbon hubs in the far north with onsite renewable power (wind in this case) coupled with onsite sequestration. How many do we hope to deploy? Gee, the sky is the limit (no pun intended)

We know that we have a lot of learning to do and need to take it one step at a time. Our first deployment will be a 1,000 tonne per year project in Fermont Quebec where we will likely struggle due to unforeseen challenges and learn a ton (again, no pun intended!). From there, we’ll follow our partners at TUGLIQ and deploy a demo at a mining site for a plant that can capture 10,000 to 16,000 tonnes or so (TBD based on the Fermont project). With these two projects under our belts, we’ll have to get the right partners and advice from the CDR community on how best to scale to maximize impact.

Barriers To Scale

What do you think are the biggest barriers to scaling Direct Air Capture at the speed the world needs?

Vida Gabriel - Right now, the biggest challenges are public preception/buy-in and cost. DAC works—it’s been proven in labs, it’s been demonstrated in pilot projects, but scaling it up requires serious investment - both in terms of capital and education. The good news is that the cost is coming down, especially with optimizations like our cold-climate approach, and there is more awareness of what CDR is in general and its importance to our economy and future on earth.

Another big challenge is infrastructure. Capturing CO2 is one thing, but you also need somewhere to put it. That means expanding or developing new sequestration sites, or using the CO2 in things like concrete. Canada has the geology for long-term storage, but we need policies and incentives to build out that infrastructure faster (and legislation for subsurface storage in all of the provinces and territories).

The last and most important barrier from an investor’s perspective is that of the CDR credit market. Right now, most of the demand for carbon removal comes from voluntary buyers—companies that are making net-zero commitments and are willing to risk some capital to deliver on their commitments. But for DAC to scale to the level we need, we need governments to step in and start procuring carbon removal at a much larger scale (which Canada is doing by the way!)

Biggest Challenges

What's the biggest challenge facing CDR’s nature-based/ science-based solutions, and what is required to scale and solve them in 2024?

Vida Gabriel - Both are so important, but they have different challenges and benefits to consider.

Nature-based solutions, like reforestation and soil carbon storage, are absolutely needed and have remarkable cobenefits like rebuilding maintaining our ecosystems. One challenge they face (in terms of durable carbon removal) is permanence—a wildfire, drought, or any other natural disaster can lead to the carbon being re-released to the atmosphere. This doesn’t mean we should neglect nature based solutions, it just means that we should diversify our CDR approaches and scale them appropriately for highest impact vs land use for example.

Science-based solutions, like DAC and mineralization, have higher permanence but are capital intensive. They also need a clearer market signal to scale and should include other tangible cobenefits.

So, If I could wave a magic want and see what’s needed in 2024 to get us to where we need to be? Three things:

1. Stronger policy support – Governments need to create demand by setting clear targets and funding removal projects (again, Canada is doing this!)

2. More corporate adoption – and this can only be done if startups like TerraFixing take the time to understand industry’s paintpoints and help to solve for them directly. That’s how we’ll get more corporate adoption of high-quality, durable carbon removal.

3. “If there is food, they will come” - this was the motto we used to attract students to events when I worked in uOttawa residents. In this case, the “food” would be infrastructure. If we have some of the basic infrastructure (or at the least, policy to help expedite the permitting process for this infrastructure), the barrier to tech deployment and adoption will be lowered. This is sort of what DeepSky is doing in Alberta.